B Maurer
Biographic Data
| ID | 16760 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Maurer |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Maurer |
| SIGNATURE | MAURER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5339-9893 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 109 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 994 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 109 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Money's ends and epistemic burdens
Roundtable: Establishing Veterans Studies as an Academic Discipline
Ten individuals who played key roles in formalizing veterans studies at American universities or within professional associations reflect on the field’s origins, key developments, institutional support, social and historical influences, and its evolution over time. Their responses, condensed and edited for clarity, elucidate the invisible, arduous, and complex labor involved in attempting to establish an academic discipline in 21st century Americ…
Le pouvoir d’achat d’un billet de banque: Du marché de Makola à Accra à un quartier de Long Beach en Californie
Dans le massif du Haut-Jura, à la frontière franco-suisse, s’est installé à partir des années 2000 un système de « route-frontière », qui transforme l’espace-frontière fait de compétences et d’opportunités partagées en force d’attractivité des entreprises suisses horlogères pour une main-d’œuvre de « frontaliers » formés, résidant et consommant en France. Dans le même temps, la métropole du Grand Genève a fait le choix de domicilier en France les…
A promise is a promise: A love letter from the ACH to the world of 2050
Experiments in money often recapitulate long-standing human concerns over finality and fixity, despite money's reference points in political authority, trust, and the memorialization of relationships of credit and debt. From the point of view of the primary set of infrastructures facilitating the movement of money in 2050, those concerns are misplaced. Recounting the history of those infrastructures, this love letter from a future intelligence is…
Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy: AE interviews Bill Maurer and Chris Vasantkumar
Jane Guyer's negative capability
Forum: "Lévi-Strauss's "The Mathematics of Man
In a recent issue (Vol. 67, No. 2), we published a new translation, by Matthew Carey, of Claude Lévi-Strauss's seminal but often overlooked essay "The Mathematics of Man," which was originally published in French in 1956. As Susanne Küchler suggested in her introduction to the text, Lévi-Strauss's insistence on seeing mathematics as more than just a means of quantification and statistical analysis should be of enduring inspiration to anthropologi…
Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Tax Evasion: The Consequences of International Policy Initiatives on Financial Centres in the Caribbean Region , by Aretha M. Campbell
Some pig! Exchanging NFTs for the perspective of regeneration
There are a thousand more silly ideas for every utopian blockchain project to heal the planet, foster financial justice, transform cultural production or democratize practically anything and everything. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are one of them. The funny thing is that the more you pick at them, the more they harmonize with certain longstanding anthropological arguments. Non-fungibility lurks in the anthropological imagination of non-capitalist …
Blockchain
Archaeologists of the future trying to understand computer network technologies of the early 21st century may stumble upon something called blockchain. Digital media scholar Finn Brunton maps out a speculative methodology for future scholars encountering, as he did, the "digital middens" of the era of networked computing – the "accidental archives, collections of digital rubbish", "the accumulations of by-products and junk and trash and bits and …
Data forward: An Afterword
Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant, and the Queering of Bretton Woods
Economy
This chapter explores the author experiences in and reflections on things economic in the context of teaching, research, and working within university administration, as well as with interlocutors in various locations in industry and finance. It situates recent developments in the anthropological study of economy in a longer historical context of the subfield of economic anthropology, it cannot escape the time of its writing. If everybody maximiz…
Afterword.: Monetary Ingenuity: Drink It In
The gift of money: Dematerialization, demonetization, and money’s pedigree
Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean, by Peter James Hudson
s terrific book chronicles the rise of international banking from the end of the Spanish American War to the crises that led to the Great Depression.Beginning in the new zones of American power-Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Haiti-the story wends through the Caribbean with detours through the Philippines, Argentina, Mexico, and the American West.It captures a world transitioning from nineteenth-century colonial European projects to an …
Finance as 'bizarre bazaar: Using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge
Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity - opaque, secretive and increasingly placeless - precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, but they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geer…
The Gift of Money: Dematerialization, Demonetization, and Money's Pedigree
Partant de la démonétisation en 2016 des grosses coupures en roupies indiennes, cet essai reconsidère la position chartaliste sur le « don » d'argent de l'État et s'inspire de Marilyn Strathern sur les distinctions entre partage, emprunt et vol. Keynes a fait valoir que l'argent devait avoir un pédigrée, une lignée continue. La démonétisation semble interrompre cette lignée. Dans le contexte plus large de la numérisation et de la dématérialisatio…
The method of the real: What do we intend with ethnographic infrastructure
What is the source of ethnographic truth? One might just as well ask what is the real economy, for neither has a clear-cut empirical referent. Critical efforts to counter economic abstractions or finance's fictions often seek a grounding truth in something "real." In anthropology, this has meant variously the household (oikos) or kinship, or the lived experiences that ethnography supposedly evokes. But none of these concepts are innocent. This es…
Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works
The pragmatics of payment: Adventures in first-person economy with Bill Maurer
Bill Maurer, Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Professor of Anthropology and Law, and Director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, all at the University of California, Irvine, has recently joined the Journal of Cultural Economy editorial team. Here, we reproduce an interview with him by Lauren Tooker from September 2014
Money: Anthropological Aspects
How Would You Like to Pay?: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money
Redeem your money here
Comment on Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The social life of money. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Postscript: Is There Money in Credit
The analytical and empirical shift from the study of the kinds of consumption facilitated by credit, to the processes and performances in consuming credit itself, opens up an array of questions for the social study of money and markets. Consuming credit relies on infrastructures of credit's creation and transmission, which in turn leave data trails in their wake. Both the infrastructures and the data suggest new business models and pose challenge…
When perhaps the real problem is money itself: The practical materiality of Bitcoin
This paper investigates the semiotics of Bitcoin, an electronic cash system that uses decentralized networking to enable irreversible payments. For enthusiasts, Bitcoin provides an alternative to currencies and payment systems that are seen to threaten users' privacy, limit personal liberty, and undermine the value of money through state and corporate oversight. Bitcoin's promise lies in its apparent capacity to resolve these concerns not through…
Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space
This article explores the emerging field of 'mobile money': mobile phone-enabled systems for value transfer and storage, primarily in the developing world, which are heralded as signal interventions in the effort to broaden financial inclusion and bank the 'unbanked.' Focusing on the stories that circulate in the emergent network of expertise that is calling 'mobile money' into being, it discusses how economic techniques and social narratives abo…
Repressed futures: Financial Derivatives' Theological Unconscious
This article explores the complex relationship between financial derivatives and theological concepts, arguing that derivatives embody a "repressed future" shaped by anxieties about time, risk, and uncertainty. Maurer draws on anthropological theories of gift exchange and sacrifice to analyze how derivatives function as a form of secularized ritual, enabling market participants to manage the inherent instabilities of capitalist finance. He examin…
Sanctioned identities: Legal constructions of modern personhood
Studies of identity politics have often overlooked the role of bourgeois law in eliciting and confirming people's experience of themselves as persons with inherent qualities that they have a right to express. By constituting people as proprietors of their persons and capacities, bourgeois law requires those who come before it to display difference. Yet bourgeois law disclaims its role in producing difference, for by declaring all men equal before…
Anthropological and accounting knowledge in Islamic banking and finance: Rethinking Critical Accounts
Accounting for accounting demands renewed attention to the knowledge practices of the accounting profession and anthropological analysis. Using data and theory from Islamic accountancy in Indonesia and the global network of Islamic financial engineers, this article challenges work on accounting's rhetorical functions by attending to the inherent reflexivity of accounting practice and the practice of accounting for accounting. Such a move is neces…
Forget Locke? From Proprietor to Risk-Bearer in New Logics of Finance
Recent debates on globalization are frequently thin with details of the mechanisms that facilitate the flow of capital across borders.What on-the-ground, back-office practices constitute and expedite those flows?What cultural logics are embedded in those practices?How can examining the shop floors, as it were, of global capital movement point toward new analyses of globalization?Such questions require a consideration of the practices of securitiz…
Due Diligence and "Reasonable Man," Offshore
In the wake of an international crackdown against preferential tax regimes, Caribbean tax havens and other jurisdictions have adopted "due diligence" procedures to manage financial and reputational risk. Due diligence relies on qualitative forms of evaluation and defers grounded and definitive knowledge claims through continuous peer review. In doing so, it mirrors certain forms of ethnographic practice at a number of levels of scale. This articl…
Introduction: Number as Inventive Frontier
Payment: Forms and Functions of Value Transfer in Contemporary Society
This article explores the diverse forms and functions of payment in contemporary society, moving beyond traditional economic analyses to consider the social, cultural, and political dimensions of value transfer. Maurer argues that payment systems are not simply neutral conduits for economic exchange but are actively involved in shaping social relations, identities, and power dynamics. The article examines a range of payment forms, from cash and c…
A Fish Story: Rethinking Globalization on Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands
Recent discussions of globalization leave the nature of movement and of the moving objects in transnational flows relatively unexamined. Incorporating historical and ethnographic material from the British Virgin Islands, I use the analogy of the critique of the study of kinship, which highlights the assumptions of person and relation built into kinship theory, to shed light on the assumptions of property and the metaphysics of movement built into…
Bridges to cash: Channelling Agency in Mobile Money
Encountered by mobile money professionals - industry and philanthropic actors seeking to bring mobile phone-enabled financial products to poor people in the 'developing world' - the authors move together with new collaborators to inquire into a problem they had been grappling with for some time. This is the problem of agency; specifically, the agency of 'mobile money agents', the people 'on the ground' or 'in the field' who form a crucial functio…
In the Mirror: The Legitimation Work of Globalization
This essay examines the legitimation work of globalization by bringing into dialogue the authors' research on immigration, finance, and intercountryadoption. It is concerned with the practices that produce, define, and preclude both movement and connection, such as “naturalizing” some border crossings while criminalizing others; denying the histories and policies that allow some parents to “choose” babies while others must abandon them; and chall…
Resocializing Finance? Or Dressing It in Mufti: Calculating Alternatives for Cultural Economies
Critical accounts of the financialization of the world economy decry the depersonalization and abstraction effected by finance in the service of extraction, expropriation and dispossession. Analysts and activists alike seek to re-socialize finance so that those whose interests it serves can be identified and so that new, socially embedded forms of exchange can emerge. They also seek to re-ground finance in a ‘real’, presumably material and social…
Uncanny Exchanges: The Possibilities and Failures of 'Making Change' with Alternative Monetary Forms
In most standard accounts, modern money depends on its function as the general equivalent. Equivalence, in turn, rotates around a specific numerological metaphysics, including the concept of zero and the algebraic function. Yet, rarely are the mathematics of equivalence subject to critical scrutiny. In this paper I explore contemporary alternative numerologies of money and finance. The alternatives that I consider are a US local scrip currency an…
"Introduction to "Ethnographic Emergences
This introduction situates the articles in this "In Focus" in terms of the history of anthropological theory. I argue that the objects under ethnographic scrutiny here compel a rethinking of ethnography as a method and a retooling of the theoretical apparatus of the discipline. Such fields as medicine, science, media, law, and environment pose challenges to modernist analytical toolkits because they are always already complex hybrids of nature an…
Incalculable Payments: Money, Scale, and the South African Offshore Grey Money Amnesty
This article seeks to refine conceptually the social study of finance and thus to extend the argument of Jane Guyer'sMarginal Gains(2004). Using the case of the South African "grey money" amnesty, this article argues that social studies of finance have failed to pay adequate attention to social payments, as opposed to market exchanges, in their pronouncements about the extension of the calculative rationality and universal commensuration that are…
Re-Regulating Offshore Finance
This article explores global efforts to regulate offshore finance in the wake of international concern about the effects of so-called harmful tax competition, as well as money laundering and terrorist financing (the latter a relatively new category since September 11, 2001). In the mid-1990s, a number of multilateral organizations, from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to the Financial Action Task Force, as well as…
Engineering an Islamic future: Speculations on Islamic financial alternatives
cipally to service Muslims not allowed to pay or receive interest.Also known as 'interest-free banking', it has enjoyed a significant rise in stature over the last three decades.For example, from its humble beginnings, the Muslim Pilgrims Savings Corporation, set up in Malaysia in l963 to help people save for performing hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina), eventually evolved in 1983 into Malaysia's first Islamic bank, the Bank Islam Malaysia Be…
Accidents of equity and the aesthetics of Chinese offshore incorporation
The British Virgin Islands is second only to Hong Kong as a source for foreign investment into China. Over the past two decades or so, Chinese entrepreneurs have demonstrated a preference for incorporating in the offshore finance centers of the Caribbean. Chinese offshore structures are different from earlier uses of the offshore in their unique and seemingly transparent aesthetic form. We show how equity-a legal argument and tradition that moder…
Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning
Finance as 'bizarre bazaar: Using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge
Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity - opaque, secretive and increasingly placeless - precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, but they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geer…
"Writing Law, Making a "Nation: History, Modernity, and Paradoxes of Self-Rule in the British Virgin Islands
Law has become a key signifier in British Virgin Islander nationalist discourse. British Virgin Islanders cast law as central to their identity as a people and celebrate the self-authoring of law. At the same time law writing has fostered continued colonial rule and subordination to the global market. The International Business Companies Ordinance, hailed as the BVI's first truly self-authored law, produced a marketable identity for the territory…
Anthropology with Business: Plural Programs and Future Financial Worlds
How can we imagine and perform an anthropological practice with business, that is, not from a distanced perspective but through a mutual infolding and engagement? How might such an arrangement then be exemplary for novel economic experiments of the kind anthropologists often describe? Reflecting on several years' of collaborations with each other, the authors recount their relationship as an experiment in novel engagements with economic things (m…
Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason
Why are people continually surprised to discover that money is "just" meaning? Mutual Life, Limited spends time among those who, in acknowledging the fictions of finance, are making money anew. It documents ongoing efforts to remake money and finance by Islamic bankers who seek to avoid interest and local currency proponents who would stand outside of national economies. It asks how alternative moneys both escape and reenact dominant forms of mon…
Fact and fetish in creolization studies: Herskovits and the problem of induction, or, Guinea Coast, 1593
Focuses on the way Melville Herkovits used facts and facticity in his scientific work on creolization, and how these facts related to the theories in his work. Author relates this to the idea of fact as a stand-alone datum, or "fetish", independent of any theory for its existence. He describes how Herkovits in his work presented classifications of intensity of African retentions in different parts of the Americas, as well as of cultural elements,…
Caribbean dance: Resistance', Colonial Discourse, and Subjugated Knowledges
Review of the literature on African-American dance in the Caribbean. The author focuses on 3 problems. The first is the construction of canons in dance anthropology. The second has to do with the ways in which these canons have dealt with dance in the Caribbean in particular. Finally, the author examines issues 'surrounding the ways anthropology creates its objects of study
Striking Out Gender: Getting to First Base with Bill Brown
Research Article| May 01 1992 Striking Out Gender: Getting to First Base with Bill Brown Bill Maurer Bill Maurer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1992) 4 (2): 143-147. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-4-2-143 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Bill Maurer; Striking Out Gender: Getting to First Base with Bill Brown. Public Culture 1 May 1992; 4 (2): 143-147. doi: https…
"Belonging," Citizenship and Flexible Specialization in a Caribbean Tax Haven (British Virgin Islands)
From Caliban to Caricom: Encountering Legality in the Caribbean
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"Writing Law, Making a "Nation: History, Modernity, and Paradoxes of Self-Rule in the British Virgin Islands
Law has become a key signifier in British Virgin Islander nationalist discourse. British Virgin Islanders cast law as central to their identity as a people and celebrate the self-authoring of law. At the same time law writing has fostered continued colonial rule and subordination to the global market. The International Business Companies Ordinance, hailed as the BVI's first truly self-authored law, produced a marketable identity for the territory…
Legitimate Acts by Mindie Lazarus-Black; Global Culture
Mindie Lazarus-Black. Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and Society in Antigua and Barbuda. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.Karen Fog Olwig. Global Culture, Island Identity: Continuity and Change in the Aftro-Caribbean Community of Nevis. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993
Orderly families for the new economic order: Belonging and citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
The British Virgin Islands became a tax haven shortly after the U.K. enacted changes to citizenship policy for itself and its colonies. The new citizenship law disaggregated an old citizenship category into several new categories and emphasized legal paternity and descent rather than place of birth. The law encouraged BVIslanders to position themselves against increasing numbers of immigrants from other Caribbean islands by imagining BVIslander i…
Sanctioned identities: Legal constructions of modern personhood
Studies of identity politics have often overlooked the role of bourgeois law in eliciting and confirming people's experience of themselves as persons with inherent qualities that they have a right to express. By constituting people as proprietors of their persons and capacities, bourgeois law requires those who come before it to display difference. Yet bourgeois law disclaims its role in producing difference, for by declaring all men equal before…
Children of Mixed Marriages on Virgin Soil: Citizenship, Descent and Place in the British Virgin Islands
Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
Creolization redux: The plural society thesis and offshore financial services in the British Caribbean
Argues that the connection between political fragmentation and offshore financial services illustrate an increasingly common vision of the political and economic future among leaders of the British Caribbean who seek to carve out a place for their countries and territories in the new global economy. Their success is based on standing outside regional federations and providing services to parties wishing to conduct business between or around econo…
Out of balance? ‘Konesans’ and first world knowledges in Caribbean women’s studies
First paragraph]We Paid Our Dues: Women Trade Union Leaders of the Caribbean. A. LYNN BOLLES. Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1996. xxxviii + 250 pp. (Paper US$21.95)Gender: A Caribbean Multi-Disciplinary Perspective. ELSA LEO-RHYNIE, BARBARA BAILEY & CHRISTINE BARROW (eds.). Kingston: Ian Randle, 1997. xix + 358 pp. (Paper n.p.)Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century. CONSUELO LOPEZ SPRINGFIELD (ed.). Bloomington: …
Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas
Review Author(s): Bill Maurer Review by: Bill Maurer Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 580- Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3034189 Accessed: 20-08-2015 22:42 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/polic…
Statemaking at the Fringes of Development
Understanding Disputes: The Politics of Argument
Understanding Disputes: The Politics of Argument. Pat Caplan. ed. Oxford, England: Berg Publishers, 1995. 248 pp
Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
If, as many cultural critics have asserted, world is becoming more like Caribbean, then task of charting what we mean by the is an urgent one. This careful study of British Virgin Islands (BVI) calls attention to ways in which ideas about nature and choice have come to justify a social order in which half population is deemed not to belong and is denied legal rights.The BVI, one of Britain's few remaining colonial possessions, has become an impor…
Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
Subjects of Law, Objects of Politics
Forget Locke? From Proprietor to Risk-Bearer in New Logics of Finance
Recent debates on globalization are frequently thin with details of the mechanisms that facilitate the flow of capital across borders.What on-the-ground, back-office practices constitute and expedite those flows?What cultural logics are embedded in those practices?How can examining the shop floors, as it were, of global capital movement point toward new analyses of globalization?Such questions require a consideration of the practices of securitiz…
Anthropology Award Winners: AES Awards Book Prizes
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology: Law & Society Association Meeting
A Fish Story: Rethinking Globalization on Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands
Recent discussions of globalization leave the nature of movement and of the moving objects in transnational flows relatively unexamined. Incorporating historical and ethnographic material from the British Virgin Islands, I use the analogy of the critique of the study of kinship, which highlights the assumptions of person and relation built into kinship theory, to shed light on the assumptions of property and the metaphysics of movement built into…
Any Time is Trinidad Time: Social Meanings and Temporal Consciousness
Any Time is Trinidad Time": Social Meanings and Temporal Consciousness. Kevin Birth. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. 190 pp
Visions of Fact; Languages of Evidence: History, Memory, and the Trauma of Legal Research
In Catholic doctrine, St. Lucy is the patron saint of the blind and of authors. According to legend, Lucy lived in Syracuse under the reign of Diocletian in the fourth century A.D. In one story, her mother, afflicted by a flux of the blood, is miraculously cured after Lucy keeps vigil at the temple of St. Agatha. Once healed, her mother assents to Lucy's desire not to wed her pagan betrothed. Diocletian, however, learns of her faith and sends his…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Sociology (60 works) · Political science (55 works) · Law (50 works) · Philosophy (39 works) · Politics (29 works) · Economics (27 works) · Epistemology (27 works) · Computer Science (25 works) · History (25 works) · Citation (24 works)